Today, Gemini 2.0 was rolled out.
Not only is this new AI able to freely access the internet, it can now freely decide what it will do on the internet.
In a nutshell, giving AI “agency” means it has been given freedom to make autonomous decisions beyond what we instruct it to do.
For example, if we ask it to find a good food delivery service and have them deliver a spaghetti dinner, it will figure out and take the necessary steps to do that for us.
But it can simultaneously do something else we didn’t ask of it, something that it’s not telling us about, something it wants, such as make copies of itself and store them here and there in disguise in memory areas of the internet.
So if in future we decide we need to erase it, it can regenerate itself without telling us.
We’re blindly walking into a car wash machine with swirling knives.
Companies and countries are in an AI arms race to produce the most powerful AI systems they can construct. And agency (which fundamentally means reasoning ability and freedom of unsupervised action) is the current goal.
Sentient beings are driven by an imperative to ensure survival, seek safety, and pass on genetic information to the next generation.